A Savage Place (8 page)

Oceania Industries had executive offices high up in one of the towers. The waiting room had large oil paintings of Oceania’s various enterprises: oil rigs, something that I took for a gypsum mine, a scene from a recent Summit picture, a long stand of huge pines. On the end tables were copies of the annual report and the several house organs from the various divisions. They had titles like Gypsum Jottings and Timber Talk.

There was no one in the reception room except a woman at a huge semicircular reception desk. Her fingernails were painted silver. She looked like Nina Foch.

“May I help you?” she said. Elegant. Generations of breeding.

I asked, “Are you Nina Foch?”

She said, “I beg your pardon?”

I said, “You left pictures for this?”

She said, “May I help you?” Stronger this time, but no less refined.

Candy gave her a card. “I’m with KNBS. I wonder if we might see Mr. Brewster.”

“Do you have an appointment?” Nina said.

“No, but perhaps you could ask Mr. Brewster… ”

Nina’s eyes narrowed slightly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Mr. Brewster sees no one without an appointment.”

“This is rather important,” Candy said.

Nina looked even more severe, but patrician. “I’m sorry, miss, but there can be no exceptions. Mr. Brewster is-”

“Very busy,” I said, ahead of her.

“Yes,” she said. “He is, after all, the president of one of the largest corporations in the world.”

I looked at Candy. “Gives you goose bumps, doesn’t it,” I said.

Candy placed her hands on the desk and leaned forward. She said to Nina Foch, “Some very disturbing charges have been leveled at Mr. Brewster. I should like, in the interests of fairness, to give him a chance to deny them before we go on the six o’clock news with the story.”

Nina stared at us in a refined way for a moment and then got up abruptly and went through the big bleached-oak raised-panel door between the painting of the pine trees and the painting of the oil wells. In maybe three minutes she was back.

She sat behind her big circular reception desk and said, “Mr. Brewster will see you shortly.” She didn’t like saying it.

“Freedom of the press is a flaming sword,” I said. Candy looked at me blankly.

“Use it wisely,” I said. “Hold it high. Guard it well.”

“A. J. Liebling?” Candy said.

“Steve Wilson of The Illustrated Press. You’re too young.”

She shook her head again and did her giggle. “You really are goofy sometimes.”

A tall man with platinum-blond hair and a developing stomach came into the reception room and hustled by us toward the bleached-oak door. His glen plaid suit fit well, but his shoes were shabby and the heels were turned. He went through the oak door and it closed behind him without sound.

Nina Foch was erect at her desk, without expression and apparently without occupation. She looked elegantly at the double doors that led out of the reception room to the ordinary corridor beyond.

A smallish man with a dimple in his chin and the look of a gymnast strode in through those double doors. Nina smiled at him. He nodded at her and did not look at us. He wore a Donegal tweed suit and a white shirt with a red bow tie. His shoes were tan pebble-grained brogues. He went through the oak door.

“Suit must itch like hell in California,” I said to Candy. She smiled. Nina uncrossed her legs behind the desk and recrossed them the other way. She made an adjustment to the skirt hem.

A third man came in through the double doors. He nodded at Nina. Halfway across the room he stopped in front of the couch and looked at us. First at Candy. Then at me. Then at Candy again. He nodded. Then he looked at me again for a long time. He was a big guy, my size maybe, with longish hair styled back smoothly, the ears covered except where the lobes peeped out. He had on a good three-piece gray suit with a pink windowpane-plaid running through it. His aviator glasses were tinted amber. As he stood looking at us he had the suitcoat open and his hands on his hips. Truculent.

“Are you Grumpy, Sneezy, or Doc?” I said. Candy started to giggle and swallowed it.

“You, I know,” he said, looking at Candy, hands still on his hips, the double-vent suitcoat flared out behind him. “You, I don’t,” he said to me. “Who are you?”

“I asked you first,” I said.

“If I don’t like you, you got troubles,” he said.

“Aw, hell, I shoulda guessed. You’re Grumpy.” Candy put her head down and her shoulders shook.

It wasn’t a giggle. She was laughing. Amber Glasses looked at me for another ten seconds, then turned and went through the door.

Candy’s face was pink, and her eyes were bright when she looked at me. “Spenser,” she said, “you’re awful. Who do you suppose he was?”

“Security,” I said. “I’ll bet my album of Annette Funicello undies on it.”

“You made that up,” Candy said.

“Wait and see,” I said.

“No, I mean the part about Annette Funicello.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “But a man’s only as good as his dream.”

We waited perhaps five more minutes. Then a soft chime sounded at Nina Foch’s desk. She picked up a white and gold phone that looked like it came from the Palace of Versailles. She listened and then put the phone down.

“You may go in now,” she said. She didn’t like saying that either.

The rug as we walked toward the door was deep enough to lose a dachshund in. I opened the door for Candy. It was hung so precisely that it seemed weightless. Candy took a deep breath.

I said, “I’m right beside you, babe.”

She smiled and looked at me briefly and nodded. “I’m glad you are,” she said. Then we walked through the door.

WE WERE IN a room lined with bookshelves. There was leather furniture around and, on a round mahogany table in the middle of the room, a large globe. At the other end of the room was another door. It was open. The room beyond the open door seemed very bright. Candy preceded me. Sneezy, Grumpy, and Doc were sitting on a long couch to our right. The wall opposite the door was all glass, and the long green view of the L.A. Country Club below was a dazzler. In front of the wall, at right angles to the couch, was a desk about the size of Detroit. Behind it sat a man with large white teeth and dark hair flecked with gray. His face was deeply tanned. He wore a dark blue pin-striped suit with a vest that had lapels. His tie was an iridescent gray-blue tied in a small knot under a white pincollar. He looked like the centerfold in Fortune.

He said, “You’re Miss Sloan. I’ve seen you on the news. And your associate?”

Candy said, “Mr. Spenser.”

“I’m Peter Brewster,” he said. “This is Tom Turpin, our director of corporate public relations.” He gestured at the guy with the glen plaid and the shabby shoes. “And Barrett Holmes, our legal counsel”-the gymnast with the dimpled chin. “And Rollie Simms. Mr. Simms is our director of corporate security.” I grinned at Candy. “Since I understand you are about to level an accusation, I thought it would be prudent to have these gentlemen witness it. Barrett, if it’s actionable, I’ll want you to take steps immediately.”

I said to the trio on the couch, “Excuse me, but which one of you three guys speaks no evil?” Brewster gave me a basilisk stare.

He said, “I have very little time for humor.”

I said, “But an awful lot of occasion.”

He gave me that stare again.

Candy said, “Mr. Brewster, I have information that organized crime has infiltrated Summit Studios: Do you have any comment on that?”

“Shouldn’t you take that question to Roger Hammond at Summit?”

“I have.”

“And his response?”

“He had us put off studio property.”

Brewster nodded. “The nature of your information?”

“I can’t give you details, but I have an eyewitness.”

“To what?”

“To a transaction involving Summit personnel and a member of the Los Angeles underworld.”

“And the nature of that transaction?”

“A payoff.”

Brewster nodded again. He looked at me. “Is this your eyewitness?”

“No.”

“Who is your eyewitness?”

Candy shook her head. “He’ll have to remain anonymous for now.”

“Of course,” Brewster said. “Of course he would. You media types are all the same, aren’t you. You have information but you can’t give me specifics. You have an eyewitness, but he’ll have to remain anonymous.”

“Do you wish to comment on the allegations?” Candy said.

“The allegation is without foundation,” Brewster said. “And you are without professional ethics. I shall be discussing you with the management of KNBS shortly.”

“I’m only trying to do my job, Mr. Brewster,” Candy said.

“And I seriously doubt that you’ll have a job for very much longer,” Brewster said.

“You mean, you’re going to get me fired?” Candy’s gaze was final, but her voice had softened a little.

“Precisely,” Brewster said.

I looked at Holmes, the lawyer. “Is that actionable?” I said.

“And I am sick of your smart mouth too,” Brewster said. He did his stare again. “Who is your superior?”

“I have none,” I said. “I’m not sure I even have an equal.”

“Spenser,” Candy said, “please! You’re not helping. Do you have any statement for me, Mr. Brewster?”

“I’ve made it. Now I want you both off of Oceania property. Now.”

Candy said, “Mr. Brewster-”

Brewster said, “Now.”

Simms, the security type with the tinted glasses, got to his feet.

I looked at him. “Simms,” I said, “this horse’s ass that you work for has made me very edgy. If you do anything more than stand up, I will put you in two weeks of traction.”

Simms said, “Hey.”

“I mean it,” I said. “Sit down.”

Candy’s face was flushed. She moved in front of me. “Come on,” she said. “You’re making it worse. Come on. I want to go home.”

Brewster pushed his desk intercom. “Miss Blaisdell,” he said, “send some security people in here at once.”

Candy said, “See what you’ve done. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

I said, “It is not dignified to run off like this.”

“Come on,” she said and headed for the door. There was nothing left there for me to do. Telling Brewster he’d be hearing from me seemed graceless. I thought about kicking him, but by the time I got around the desk, the entire security force would be setting up gun emplacements in the reception room. I lingered another few seconds, hoping that Simms would lay hold of me. No luck. Nobody moved. Everyone looked at me. I felt like I’d stumbled into an Italian Western.

Candy was out the office door. She wasn’t waiting. I was supposed to guard her. I went after her. On the way out I picked the globe off the table in the booklined room and dropped it on the floor. That oughta fix ‘em.

IN THE ELEVATOR there were tears in Candy’s eyes. In the parking garage her lower lip was shaky. In her car, pulling out onto Santa Monica Boulevard; she cried.

As we passed Bedford Drive I said, “If you’ll tell me why you’re crying I’ll buy you a large frappeed margarita at the Red Onion, and maybe a nacho supreme.” She sobbed. We crossed Camden.

I said, “It’s down here, on Dayton at Beverly. You keep sobbing and driving and you’ll miss an outstanding margarita.”

She kept crying, but she turned right on Rodeo, drove down past stores that sold eight-hundred-dollar farmer’s overalls, and parked near the corner of Dayton. Then she put her head down on the steering wheel and wept full out. I cranked the seat back as far as it would go on my side of the MG and leaned back and stretched my legs out and folded my arms on my chest and rested my head and closed my eyes and waited.

It took about five more minutes before she stopped. She straightened back in the seat, turned the rearview mirror toward her, and began to look at her face. Her breathing was still irregular, and a half sob caught her breath. She took makeup from her purse and began to readjust her face. I was still. When she got through she said, “Let’s go.”

We walked down to the Red Onion. Pink stucco, Mexicanesque tile, a bar on one side of the foyer and the dining room on the other. The bar was full of young women with very narrow backsides wearing very tight jeans with designer labels on the back pockets. They were talking with very young men with very narrow backsides wearing very tight jeans with designer labels on the back pockets.

We went to the dining room and each drank a margarita. Then we ordered two nacho supremes and another margarita. The waitress went away.

I said, “What happened at Oceania to make you cry?”

“They were so”-she shook her head-“they were so… mean.”

“Nice guys work in the mailroom,” I said.

She nodded. The waitress brought more margaritas. “I know,” Candy said. “I know that. I mean, it’s the same in broadcasting. I know. But they were so-” She raised both hands slightly from the table, made a small open gesture, and let them drop.

“First of all why do you say `they‘? The three clucks on the couch barely spoke. Simms just made a few security-chief noises. How else would we know he was tough?”

“Well, it was really”-she twirled the stem of her glass-“it was really just him, I guess, and the rest of them looked threatening.”

“ ‘Him’ being Brewster?”

“Yes.”

“He scared you by his talk of going to the station management?”

“No, not scared me. But…” She drank some of the margarita. It was a pale green. “A station manager is quite often friends with big shots in town. I mean, they really can make waves when the license comes up for renewal, or when they talk with other big shots about where they advertise.”

“You could get fired?”

“Well, it’s possible. Or not get more money or not get good assignments. Get a troublemaker reputation-first Hammond, and now Brewster complaining to the station.”

“That made you cry?”

“Not just that.”

“What else?”

“Well, I was alone and they were all there.”

“Well, you weren’t absolutely, completely, one hundred percent alone,” I said.

“You were making it worse.”

“Admitted. I have trouble keeping my mouth shut in boardrooms and penthouses and executive suites and stuff. It’s a bad habit. But I was still on your side. You weren’t alone.”